


The Martyr Rose Lalonde's "An Account of a Discovery" (with Marginalia)

by cosmogyral



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Epistolary, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-28
Updated: 2012-12-28
Packaged: 2017-11-22 17:57:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/612613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmogyral/pseuds/cosmogyral
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>
  <span class="roxy">PROPERTY OF ROXY LALONDE AGE 10</span>
  <br/>
  <span class="roxy">CARAPACIA lmao LAND OF NEW YORK</span>
  <br/>
  <span class="roxy">FLOODED SUCKY EARTH THE UNIVERSE</span>
</p><p>  <strong>Introduction</strong></p><p>Shortly after the disappearances of Dave Strider and Rose Lalonde, a message was sent to the collected forces of the revolution with only an anonymized email address and the password hint, <em>Told you.</em> The mailbox contained seven hundred files of varying import, including casual photographs, IM logs, and saved articles which later provided vital clues to the Batterwitch's true intent. This file, "confessionsofyodawgustine003.docx", is one of several in a numbered sequence, each of which contains a small portion of the Martyr Lalonde's life story. The challenges of print and the efforts of schismatics have long prevented us from circulating a copy with all the Martyrs' commentary, but the discovery of a cache of the Martyr's favorite ink has allowed us at last to proceed.</p><p>May we all light such fires.</p><p>  <em>December 2021</em><br/><em>New York, New York</em></p>
    </blockquote>





	The Martyr Rose Lalonde's "An Account of a Discovery" (with Marginalia)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [YaketySax](https://archiveofourown.org/users/YaketySax/gifts).



> PROPERTY OF ROXY LALONDE AGE 10   
>  CARAPACIA lmao LAND OF NEW YORK   
>  FLOODED SUCKY EARTH THE UNIVERSE
> 
> **Introduction**
> 
> Shortly after the disappearances of Dave Strider and Rose Lalonde, a message was sent to the collected forces of the revolution with only an anonymized email address and the password hint, _Told you._ The mailbox contained seven hundred files of varying import, including casual photographs, IM logs, and saved articles which later provided vital clues to the Batterwitch's true intent. This file, "confessionsofyodawgustine003.docx", is one of several in a numbered sequence, each of which contains a small portion of the Martyr Lalonde's life story. The challenges of print and the efforts of schismatics have long prevented us from circulating a copy with all the Martyrs' commentary, but the discovery of a cache of the Martyr's favorite ink has allowed us at last to proceed.
> 
> May we all light such fires.
> 
> _December 2021_  
>  _New York, New York_

**An Account of a Discovery**

10:31 This is for posterity.

Perhaps if I had developed the ability to See the truth before I discovered Jade English, I would never have sought out her cache, and never known half of the things she had to offer, so it is lucky for all of us that my development was delayed. I have not been entirely honest, elsewhere, on the length of that delay. It seemed dangerous to own that I was as young and stupid as my opponent believed me to be, and in any case, my readers would have taken it as a bad story. The young always believe that powers descend upon you at the age you are most able to bear them, when in fact you are either confronted with them long before you know what to do with them or else your only recourse is to drag them out of the holes in which they hide.

7:02 [note: cnvrt 3rd person? delete maundering, if time]

I was twenty, and at Miskatonic. I was a Crocker Scholar for Literature. I had a bet on with a foster-sister of mine that I could convince the state to take my face off its posters without losing the scholarship, but I hadn't seen my way clear to it yet, which is why I was attending the Occluded Technologies class, taught by a professor who had had tenure so long he was permitted to teach classes with that sort of ridiculous title. Sometimes students even sat in on the classes, but he seemed to consider it a sort of necessary evil.

This was before the heavy censorship, too, so we learned first about some of Crocker's more dubious business moves along with 2nd example and the attempts of Thomas Midgley to leaden gas. It was a casual byline that piqued my attention. "Then there's Skaianet, of course," the professor said. "I think it's safe to assume they didn't pull all their products overnight on purpose. And why should the retreat of the CEO--"

At this point he'd clicked over to the slide, and all my attention was taken up by the relentless familiarity of the woman on it. Jade English had attained heights of grandmaternality that would cause lesser women to weep, and the three-foot-long assault rifle seemed on her shoulder the natural accessory of any kindly octogenarian, as was the cluster of friendly robots at her feet.

8:16 haha yeah was it that photo of her with the bioweapon pie that was the shit

9:22 I'm fairly sure all of her pies were classified as bioweapons, but that's the one. Do we have a copy?

10:01 uh kinda 1

I didn't know why she was so familiar. Worse, I didn't know how to find out. Stories about her life were somehow perpetually vandalized. Paywalls developed new and intriguing bugs every time I approached an article with her name. Certainly the strings of "Rose Lalonde" "Jade English" that I dispatched into the ether turned up nothing but the damning "Did you mean 'Rose Lalonde' 'jaded ectopy'?" The professor was more helpful. During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless decade in the autumn of the century, Skaianet had suffered leak after leak, each of which harmed the release of one of its most cherished products, some of which also made the development of the product seem faintly sinister and dangerous to the fabric of society. Its reclusive CEO had at last decided to privatize the corporation. She gave her one and only press conference on the occasion. It was surpassingly cryptic; some speculated that English had gone senile. Perhaps I could get a better look at her in that? He assured me that there simply must be a recording, somewhere. 

But there didn't seem to be.

Anyway, she had vanished, and only her banker and her real estate agent, presumably, knew where. I expected I would hear of her one day, and we would meet, in the same sort of fantasy in which I would meet J. D. Salinger and he would take me to his faintly smoky arms and say that I was the only one who had ever truly understood his work. No one vanished, not since the invention of People Magazine. If the paparazzi couldn't find her, that might simply have to do with the assault rifle.

And there it might have sat, except that when I was twenty-two, the Crocker Scholar for Business was shot in the head.

7:32 confessionsofyodawgustine006.docx

I had been emancipated the previous year, so it caused no one any consternation when I locked up my apartment, sold my car, and bought a ticket to Baharna, where Skaianet's factory had once stood. Baharna was wet in its spring, and the farthest I'd ever been from New England by about ten thousand miles. I hated it. I had never been this warm before. I was constantly wiping the sweat from my eyes, and wondering, once again, if I had finally become the ice goddess of keysmash 7

9:22 Shit. Sorry. "If I had finally truly succumbed to my own burgeoning paranoia."

10:00 mines better

When night fell, I went down to the canals. These let out onto the ocean through vast, beautiful gates, and I felt positive shame as I shot out the lock on one and slipped in. I remember that I had hoped they, at least, would be cool, but instead they were merely dank, and long, and much too dark to see in. I put my hand on the wall (I had neglected to bring anything as practical as gloves) and followed the labyrinthine road until it sloped upwards into the factory grounds.

There followed a small period of unpleasantness.

8:19 note put in any of the goddamn derringdo that i did because a that shit is interesting and b that shit is historically relevant and if im going to make my partner in crime look over the girls bumper book of finding out that tech companies were secretly started by the revolution then im going to at least put in the parts where i shot some dudes

9:22 I only wish I had "shot some dudes". I shot out the floodlights and then the lights in the guard tower, at which point I fell over my own feet and managed to barely avoid being tackled by an elephantine guard. When the second wave poured out of the front door, I limped in after them. Anyone with the least ability to set up a perimeter check would have taken me down within an instant.

10:00 fyi if you trip over your own feet in front of crocker im gonna bleed on you

It was impossible, on short notice, to get the blood out of my shirt, so I stuck to the shadows. It was too easy for me to slip along their serpentine route and achieve the lofty heights of the long-term storage facility. deleted some gen 2 stuff here you gotta remember this is gonna be read At least _this_ was cool. It was labyrinthine, vast, whirring, and faintly menacing as well; the space had been left untouched in the hostile takeover, in the hopes of recovering Skaianet secrets. An array of file cabinets had been ransacked near the front. The one I sought was in an out-of-the-way corner and contained only press clippings, except for one tape in the very bottom drawer.

I ought, of course, to have waited until I returned. I believe at the time I rationalized it to myself by imagining that Crocker would know what was taken, and therefore what my interests were--this despite the fact that Crocker had laid her reptilian eyes on me only once, at the funeral, and would not by any stretch of the imagination connect me with the vanishing industrial espionaut who had taken a recording of press conference, even supposing she should ever notice that the recording was missing. Also, there were rows of televisions near the center, each with their own tape player, and I have never been able to pass up a gift-wrapped opportunity.

Jade English had not gone to her final public humiliation lightly. She'd put her hair up for the event, and a long white dog with a long red tongue sat at her feet. The static popped over her face.

"I'll keep this short," she said, from 1993. "Skaianet has been privatized as of yesterday. I am once again the majority stockholder, and as such, I am shutting down operations until future notice." She held up a hand over the murmurs from the crowd. Having delivered her public message, she seemed to relax, her elbows coming to rest on the podium, and she gave a sudden coruscating grin.

"Okay, the rest of this isn't for your whippersnappers," she said. "This is for posterity. Specific parts of posterity, who might be wondering what's going on right now. Skaianet has a long and glorious legacy, all right? It stretches from my ambitions as a young girl, to the vaults of tomorrow. Fifty-five and a half kilometers from tomorrow, actually." She winked broadly.

8:19 you are making this up there is no way she was that obvious on national tv 2

9:23 I'm perfectly serious. She also made finger guns at the camera, but I thought I should leave that out. One must construct a myth out of something.

"Tragically, we've been the victim of repeated acts of corporate espionage," she continued. "I think it's been believed of us that just because we haven't openly confronted our attackers we are totally fine and a pushover. Well, we at Skaianet believe in the long-term plan. The _very_ long term plan. We'd like to offer to any brilliant young minds the opportunity to join us in this new phase of our development," the wink again, and a jab up at the corner of the screen, at the timestamp: 04:13. "Good luck."

There was a flurry of questions, but English didn't seem to hear any of them. She put a hand over her eyes, and stepped away from the mic.

That was the last glimpse I ever saw of Jade English. If I hadn't been in such a hurry to hear it, I could have provided all of you with a copy of it. Instead you're forced to rely on my heated insistence that she was inimitable.

The first clue remained opaque to me at the time. The second was obvious. The middle drawer of the filing cabinet slid open noiselessly on the combination 4-13 and revealed to me the

10:05 thx scheherazade ill sleep tight now

10:27 If you flew a little slower, I would have more time to finish these. I can't recount the entire history in fifteen minutes. Shall we turn this plane around? We can confront her tomor

 

 

 

 

 

1 The image embedded here was corrupted beyond our powers of reproduction. The Martyrs Strider and Lalonde were passing within the baleful influence of the Empire at this time. Perhaps the image fell prey to one of the Batterwitch's more arcane powers. 

2 Tradition records that the discussion in question was of the Vault of Heaven, the tropical island on which Jade English was assassinated. Most of the Vault was devastated in the volcanic eruption of 2011, but some portions of the sacred temples remain.

**Author's Note:**

> My betas deserve individual medals of honor. Thanks, guys.


End file.
